tenderness he'd had for other males, feelings he'd tried to repress until now, were welcomed by other horny young men whose sexual awakenings were taking place in an all-male world. And while he was haunted by vague memories of his father having contempt for 'queers,' Lloyd enjoyed, in his first year, being the favorite of an older cadet, a loving son to a loving father, so to speak. And upon that older cadet's graduation, Lloyd became loving father to several young sons.
Did Father sense something in his manner? Home for the summer, Lloyd felt his father's eyes on him, suspicious eyes that seemed to strip him naked. His military bearing, his crisp politeness, somehow did not fool Father. Father seemed to know-though of course nothing was said-that the rifles and bayonets Lloyd had been drilling with were not always made of steel.
So on his sixteenth birthday, Father gave him one of two very special gifts that Lloyd would receive in an upbringing characterized by little fatherly attention. In the dead of one memorable night, his father took him to a brothel in the Flats, where a heavily made-up whore of perhaps twenty-two literal years and a hundred figurative wound up bringing him off with her mouth, because he couldn't do it otherwise. When Lloyd returned to his father- who was waiting in a chauffeured Lincoln out front-the old man had said, 'Well?'
Lloyd, stiffly military, had said, 'Thank you, Father. It was a perfect birthday.'
And, as the boy climbed in, his father had bestowed a rare smile on his son and an even rarer pat on the shoulder.
For reasons Lloyd never knew, his father had pulled him out of the academy and put him back into public school for the senior year of high school. And the summer before his senior year, on his birthday, his father gave him the other memorable gift.
In the chauffeured Lincoln once more, they had driven in the dead of night, not to the Flats this time, but to Western Reserve University, where his father taught anatomy. In a vast, white, but dimly-lit classroom littered with lab benches, his father walked him to a wall of refrigerated drawers and pulled one out. Father flipped back the sheet and revealed the gray corpse of a man of perhaps forty.
'For you,' he told his son.
'For… me?' Lloyd began to smile; his eyes began to tear. 'My own… my very own ca… daver?'
'Your own.' And again Father bestowed a smile and a hand on the shoulder. 'This will be our secret.'
Father had even given him a set of shining stainless-steel surgical tools in a leather pouch.
And throughout the school year ahead, at least one night a week, his father would take him to Western, and while Father prepared lesson plans and corrected papers, Lloyd practiced on his cadaver. To have power over the living, Father told him, one must first learn the secrets of the dead.
It was the most time that father and son ever spent together.
Lloyd never forgot those two gifts, those two thoughtful, personal gifts his father had given him: the live female body and the dead male one.
Even now, that rare tenderness on his father's part brought tears to Lloyd's eyes. It made him feel all the more ashamed that he had let Father down.
He hadn't at first. He'd gotten in at Harvard, no problem; between his grades and Fathers connections, it had been a snap. But he hadn't exactly been an honor student-the drinking, the carousing with his fraternity brothers had taken a toll; he also had several affairs, with boys and girls, and was confused about who he was, exactly.
Sex with girls was something he could manage-like a duty; it required affection and care and time. Sex with a guy was animal, basic, in a hurry. He didn't think it was sissified conduct-he felt more a man with a man. Like the Greeks. He was a fraternity brother, wasn't he?
Anyway, his grades were good enough to get him into med school, and that was when disaster struck. He found himself drinking more and more, and his hands began to shake-it was from the drinking obviously, but how could he tell his instructors that? How could he explain to them that the lack of dexterity was temporary?
And how could he explain to his father that this temporary lack of dexterity, and this alone, had caused him to flunk out?
For several months his father said nothing to him. Literally nothing. Any communication between the two men in the large dark house was done through hand gestures or the servants. Finally Lloyd threw himself on his knees before Father, in his study, and begged forgiveness.
Father hadn't granted forgiveness, exactly, but he did say he would find 'something constructive' for his son to do.
And what Father had done was, gradually, turn his investments and business dealings over to Lloyd, who found he had a complete and immediate knack for it. At first just a bookkeeper, he soon began doing some of the actual investing and, even in these hard times, made money for his father. Of course Father said nothing by way of approval, but he eventually turned virtually everything of a business nature over to Lloyd for his managing. Father and son began to speak. Civilly. Hardly warm. But if the war would never be over, at least there was a truce of sorts.
Among the matters Lloyd managed were various rental properties. These included a number of rooming houses in some rather unsavory parts of the city, as well as the bungalow where his father had begun his career, years ago, over on Central Avenue. Father-supported by his own father, whose money was in oil-had set up a practice in that neighborhood, an office/surgery, and abandoned it as he became more established and the neighborhood declined.
In dealing with these properties, Lloyd-who had been suppressing certain of his desires-began to mingle with the lowlife scum who dwelled there. He found that for a few dollars, sometimes less than one dollar, sometimes for a beer or some smokes, he could get those desires satisfied.
But he did not want to go down that road anymore. He wanted to please his father, who after all hated queers. Lloyd began to date females of his own social class. He had been engaged to Jennifer Wainright for a year now. She was a lovely girl and innocent; very religious; steel money. She agreed with him that they should wait until after they were married to 'consummate their love.'
The engagement seemed to make his father very happy. He had smiled several times, touched Lloyd's shoulder once.
Lloyd's life had really come together in the last few years. His father was accepting him, in a limited way admittedly, as the family business manager. He was engaged to be married. He had been seeing a psychiatrist- something his father had insisted upon about the time he turned over the business affairs to his son (had somebody at college said something to Father?)-and his doctor told him he could, with therapy, overcome his 'homosexual tendencies.'
And, of course, the truly satisfying thing, the most wonderful thing, was his return to surgery.
It had begun as a disaster. It had begun with one of the lowlife sex partners attempting to blackmail him-a woman he'd had various kinds of unnatural acts with. Lloyd had made the mistake of using his real name, and this lowlife bitch had tried to turn a buck because of it. Lloyd had pretended not to be upset by the demand, and drove the woman to the bungalow on Central Avenue, which was going unrented at the moment. On the pretense of getting the money for her, he led the cheap whore down into the cellar, where his father's surgery had been, and stabbed her in the chest repeatedly with one of the scalpels from the surgical gift set.
There was a lot of blood, but, oddly, he'd had an orgasm-the most intense he'd ever had with a woman.
Maybe he wasn't queer after all.
He had laid her on the dusty, dented white-enamel examining table his father had left behind and decided the best way to get rid of the evidence was in pieces. And, for the first time in a long time, he performed surgery.
He found it very satisfying.
Late that night he drove the pieces-some of them wrapped in newspaper, some packed away in an old suitcase-up to Euclid beach and tossed them out into the water. When they washed up on shore, they would (he assumed, correctly) be thought to have washed in from the lake.
And, so, simply, elegantly, it had begun: his return to surgery, and a second sexual awakening. Sometimes the sex would be with men, but he was moving away from that; he would turn them into women sometimes, and that would make it better. He felt there was nothing at all wrong with dispatching these human derelicts-they were just so much flotsam and jetsam, after all. Faggots and whores who could serve mankind best as lab specimens.
He would keep the bodies, at least parts of the bodies, and practice both surgery and sex on them-surgery to make his father proud, and sex to improve his performance with Jennifer, when they eventually married.
